The Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) is a five-day electronic music conference and festival held annually in mid-October. The event is organized by The Amsterdam Dance Event Foundation and offers a full program of daytime conferences at ADE Pro, ADE Tech, HDE, ADE University, ADE Next, ADE Beamlab and ADE Green, alongside the nighttime ADE Festival which features 450 events and 2,200 artists over five days in 115 clubs and venues. The shows attract over 350,000 people from all over the world to the city, making Amsterdam one of the busiest clubbing cities in the world.

On the late hours of the 8th of August, the PINS team finally arrived to BOOM land, after one day in the magnificent Porto and one day traveling to our final destination for the next 10 days. BOOM festival is one of the most well-known psytrance music festivals in the world. It takes place every two years at a lake next to Idanha-a-nova (Portugal), gathering around 40.000 people. Read more

Portugal is know for being a country with innovative drug laws. Until 2000, the posession and consumption of any drug was considered ilegal and even a crime. Finally, in 2000, consumption and posession for comsumption were legally separeted from posession for traffic. Read more

See where all the organisations are from that are active with Connecting PINS

Unity is one of the organisations involved in the Connecting PINS project. It was established in 1996 in Amsterdam as a drugs and alcohol harm reduction project. An important part of projects like Unity is to keep people informed about the activities it does. Carl-Cyril co-authored a piece about some of the international efforts Unity undertakes.

By meeting in exchanges like this, you can clearly see how different organizations can be, but you also immediately notice the many similarities. The biggest similarity is surely how open-minded, unprejudiced and involved in the community everyone is. After the meetings in Paris, our minds were full of new ideas and plans and we were inspired to improve our work in the Netherlands.